Reduce Business Risk and Drive Confident Decisions with Property Data Enrichment

With Google Street View, we can zoom in for a look at virtually any property in the U.S. and in many countries across the globe. Actually seeing the image of a property, its structures, and its immediate surroundings can certainly be useful. But from a business perspective, this approach to gathering information about a property does not scale well – nor does it tell you much. What does scale is data enrichment.

Data enrichment adds deep contextual information about a property that can help businesses make data-driven decisions across a range of applications. In this article, we will explore the business value of having a comprehensive view of a property and what information data enrichment can provide across different industries.

Property data enrichment starts with a verified address. In a multi-unit or multi-story building such as a condominium or a mall, this includes the parent address – address of the building itself – and the child address, which is the designation for individual apartments, condos, businesses, or stores. We add a precise geocode, or the latitude/longitude that places a property on the face of the planet. If there is a building on the property, “precise” means the geocode represents the location of the building, not the place where the driveway meets the street. From there, Precisely can provide more than 9,000 attributes related to that location.

The Value of Property Data Enrichment

Many industries can benefit from injecting data enrichment into their current business processes. Insurance companies writing property policies, either homeowner’s or commercial, want to know about every potential risk factor related to a property. With property data, they can make an informed decision about whether they are willing to insure a property and how to price the policy. Price too high and you risk losing an opportunity. Price too low, and you risk not covering the cost of a claim.

What can data enrichment offer insurers? There is a whole category of enrichment data that helps insurers place a property in proximity to risk factors like wildfire, flooding, and weather events. Savvy companies can use data like elevation, vegetation, the proximity of other structures, and other fire risk factors, for example, to carve out low-risk opportunities in areas that otherwise have a high risk of wildfires. Other data enrichment includes parcel boundaries and building footprints, which when used in combination with points of interest can help insurers identify co-tenant and adjacent risk. What this means is, insurance companies seek to identify other businesses located in the same building as the potential insured, in an adjacent building (next door), or nearby, because these businesses can increase their risk exposure.

Data Enrichment Leads to Better Decisions in Real Estate

Another industry that is heavily impacted by having property enrichment data is PropTech, often referred to as real estate technology. PropTech companies use technology to change how people research, buy, sell, rent, or manage a property – and data is what drives this new approach. It’s a perfect match for property data enrichment, which can remove the manual work otherwise required to gather comprehensive property information from multiple sources. Data elements that are key in PropTech include complete address information, parcel boundary and building footprint geometries, property attributes, sales history, interior and exterior features, neighborhood demographics, and proximity to points of interest such as schools, shopping, restaurants, and entertainment.

Telcos Seek Insight Into New Opportunities for Expansion

With the advent of 5G, Telco companies rely on property information to make data-driven decisions about the placement of new cell and broadband infrastructure. These businesses are on a quest to identify and understand serviceable locations.  Complete address precision, accurate property classifications, building information, and property boundaries are required to understand serviceability. Also critical are building attributes such as elevation, type of construction, and the number of floors for accurate placement of 5G small cells.

Another important aspect in designing Telco infrastructure is knowing who the potential customers are in an area and whether they are good prospects for fixed wireless internet, general internet, or 5G services. That means attaching demographic information to addresses at a much more granular level than a postal code area. Consider how many different neighborhoods there are in your own postal code and the variations from neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street, and even building to building.

Drive Better Decisions with Details Relevant to Desired Business Outcomes

 This same detailed and precise demographic information is of great value to virtually any company that serves consumers and wants to know more about who their customers are. By locating an address in a neighborhood and associating it with census demarcations, data enrichment can provide a wealth of demographics related to the area. Add in data about location and type of other businesses, and we have the data enrichment solution that can help retailers or restaurants select new locations or analyze changes in traffic patterns.

In addition to these examples, parcel boundaries, building footprints, and the wealth of property-related information available through data enrichment are used in geo-based marketing, urban planning, property development, rural development, navigation mapping, and more. The key takeaway is that data enrichment can provide a complete view of a property, and no matter what the business application, that complete view is crucial to evaluating risk and identifying business opportunities.

To learn more read our eBook Achieving Data Interoperability and see how Precisely can help businesses manage and organize data and bring greater location context to their analysis to answer the biggest challenges around data.